The Revolutionary Workers Group began as a faction of a faction of a faction in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Within the SWP there was a Proletarian Orientation Tendency (POT).

Within the POT there was the Leninist Faction (LF).

Within the LF there was an informal "state capitalist" faction. These are our protagonists.

The POT would not wage a factional battle that meant being expelled. The Leninist Faction, on the other hand, left the SWP in October 1972. They became (or possibly were already) known as the Class Struggle League (CSL).

Within the LF/CSL, an informal "state capitalist" faction had developed as early as August 1972. Its main differences were on the trade union policy, the national question, labor parties, and the Soviet Union. After much debate, this group ultimately came to the position that the USSR was state capitalist and should not be defended in the event of war.

After the CSL announced it would fuse with the _Vanguard Newsletter_ (a split from the Spartacist League, itself a 1960s split from the SWP), the state capitalist tendency inside the CSL formalized as the Revolutionary Workers Faction. They quickly exited the CSL and became the Revolutionary Workers Group.

(So far, our history is bases itself on "The Origins of the Revolutionary Workers Group" in the March 1973 issue of Workers' Truth, plus pages 875-876 of Alexander's International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: a documented analysis of the movement.)

Starting March 1973 the RWG published Workers' Truth, originally a longer journal-style publication, later a 4-8 page newspaper. The move to the newspaper format likely coincided with the appearance of a theoretical journal, Forward, in late 1973 or early 1974.

From its beginning, the Revolutionary Workers Group was far enough from Trotskyism that it could publish a pamphlet called "From Trotskyism to Marxism." On the other hand, in its first issue it declared that the Socialist Workers Party had "ceased to be a working class party" only in 1970!

To its credit the RWG was moving towards the positions of the communist left.

The Revolutionary Workers Group sent a delegation to the founding conference of the International Communist Current in January 1975. However, this led to nothing, and by the end of 1975 they no longer listed the ICC as a group with similar positions, now listing just Pour une Intervention Communiste, Revolutionary Perspectives and Workers' Voice (the latter two soon joining together to form the Communist Workers' Organisation). This similarly led to nothing for the RWG.

By fall of 1976, Forward became the Forward Discussion Bulletin and all traces of the Revolutionary Workers Group name seemed to disappear. The members now referred to themselves as the "Forward group." This seems to reflect a change in politics, since one member wrote in _Forward Discussion Bulletin_ no. 1 that some members "feel it is misleading to refer to ourselves as an 'organization' because of the immediate connotation of bourgeois organizational methods: hierarchy, subservience, bureaucracy, etc." They also seemed to  retain a communist perspective while rejecting Marxism, writing that "Marxism proved, in practice, to be no higher than the revolutionary bourgeois epoch which produced it."

The group soon disappeared.

By 1980 or so there was another, unrelated, uninteresting Revolutionary Workers Group, this one seemingly existing on the periphery of the Spartacist League.